Living with Water Scarcity by David Zetland

Author:David Zetland
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Publisher: Aguanomics Press
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

Account for available resources

Bargain to determine rights and priorities

Codify rights and priorities into rules

Delegate implementation to appropriate agencies

Engineer the infrastructure necessary to deliver water

Feedback results to adjust steps A-E

We discussed A–D, with the caveat that details depend on local institutions. We will discuss infrastructure in Chapter 8, but we know already that infrastructure can impede or facilitate reallocation. Now F. Feedback is essential if we want to correct errors and adapt to changing conditions. Adaptation takes place by changing rights to account for environmental flows, regulating quality, improving accounting, and so on. Those methods are discussed elsewhere in the book. Let’s discuss markets as a means of adapting now.

Markets for water

Today’s distribution of water rights may not reflect or reconcile new and existing users’ diverse valuations of water. The current distribution of rights may also fail to reflect changing social priorities. These observations imply that existing water rights or flows may need to be reshuffled.

Consider, for example, two communities of farmers in southern California. Farmers near San Diego grow avocado trees using water supplied by a regional water agency. Farmers to the east, in Imperial Valley, grow alfalfa, switchgrass, lettuce and other water-intensive crops using water from the Colorado River. The avocado farmers do not have senior water rights. Their water is expensive. Imperial Valley farmers with senior rights pay about one-tenth the price avocado farmers pay. These facts hint at big differences in water values and the potential benefits of reallocation when drought struck and supplies fell, but there was no market. We could have seen a shift of water from alfalfa fields to avocado trees that would have benefitted everyone. Instead we saw hundreds of dead avocado trees, bankrupt farmers, and traumatized communities.

This dramatic example illustrates only one way that markets can improve efficiency by moving water to higher value uses. A market can also be used within an irrigation district where people are retiring, shifting between annual and permanent crops (from corn to trees), or facing excess demand for limited supplies. They can reallocate water flows for one year or water rights forever. Regional markets can help cities share a river crossing their territories, governments purchase water to restore environmental flows, or industries reshuffle water portfolios among dams, factories and power plants.

Although some people think that political or bureaucratic mechanisms are faster or more effective at transferring rights to meet social priorities, many of these same people often fail to consider the legal and logistical complications of taking water from traditional users. Bureaucrats will have a hard time separating truth from embellishment among noisy supplicants and highly paid advocates agitating for priority. Farmers will like the opportunity to sell or rent their water to urban and industrial interests, but who sells at what price?

Markets can supply those answers, but they should only be used after allocating water to environmental flows (Chapter 10) within the context of Chris Perry’s checklist. We need to know, in other words, how much water is available, who has the rights to that water, who oversees water allocations, and how infrastructure will permit or prevent reallocations.

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